Apologies for lack of activity, been busy working on school stuff and will be for a few more weeks.

I envision the example suite being more of a Vertical Slice, a Vertical Slice is a literal slice of gameplay usually 30 mins - 1 hour long that provides a small idea of what the main ideas of the game are in action.

This engine is not something revolutionary, but it does have one major element that does benefit it greatly. It makes a certain type of game very easy to build for an indie team, if we show the engine not only being able to power Morrowind but also being able to power a game that while similar in genre has a different fundamental set of mechanics and concepts it would shine the engine in a new light not often seen.

Therefore, I propose we build out a Vertical Slice of this concept I have, I am planning after my Assessment week (early July) I will write up a full pitch that explains what I envision and not just through forum posts, sorry for it being so far away but I need to focus on finishing up prior engagements.

I've been reading through everything and thinking about everyone's comments and points of view. As an example suite and not a fully fleshed out game maybe the story needs to take a back seat. If the target audience is not really players but developers then we want the ES to sell the engine and convince devs that they might want to consider using OpenMW for their next project.

How about at the very beginning we start with an example character. The person playing can play that pre-made character or they can build their own and see just how many options the engine has. If our audience is a dev team then do we really need to say "you have amnesia". I think not. We can just put the character on the island for no reason. Or if we really want to be ballzy about it, we can have an NPC that looks vaguely like Ricardo Montalban welcome the character tot he island and tell the character that they can explore and live out all their "dreams".

To show off the engine, we need a town. Two small houses and one large house should do. This means there will be a handful of NPCs to talk so we can show off our dialogue system. The player finds out about a wizard tower and a cave on the other side of the island. The wizard tower is so we can have some magic based combat and the cave is for either stealth or face to face combat. Each type of enemy we create is there to show off a different aspect of what the engine can do.

Can OpenMW let the player sit on a boat and let the boat move around the island? Well that's something that old morrowind engine could not do so let's put that in the ES so devs know the engine can do that. (unless Openmw can't do that in which case never mind but you get the idea).

It's kind of strange. I'm a professional writer and I came here hoping something of my ideas for a story might make it in and I'd have the chance to write a lot of dialogue and maybe even voice act a lot of it. I'd love it if OpenMW had something like from system shock where you could click on some text in a dialogue and hear a recording of it. But even though it seems the ES is really going to be more technically oriented than story focused, I actually feel more attached to the project and I want to see it succeed.